No mention is made again of the living creatures till chapter three where the following verse is found:
13. I heard also the noise of the wings of the living creatures that touched one another, and the noise of the wheels over against them, and a noise of great rushing.
This combines some of the ideas of earlier verses without adding any new information. Notice that writer has the notion that the wings of one creature touched those of another, or that the creatures touched one another.
This verse is typical of several more scattered throughout the first third of the book. All the verses mentioning the living creatures after the first chapter are more dramatic and all fail to continue the style of a careful reporter. No new ideas are advanced, but some rather unusual contradictions are introduced, by using several parts of several verses of Chapter One. Chapter Ten reads like an attempt at rephrasing Chapter One and Chapter Eleven is the last mention of the living creatures in the entire book.
Although it contains no further information on the living creatures, Chapter Three has a verse that should be mentioned. Verse fifteen sounds like a fitting conclusion to the first chapter:
15. Then I came to them of the captivity at Tel-Abib, that dwelt by the river Chebar, and I sat where they sat, and remained there astonished among them for seven days.
Just what do we have? We have a description of four spacesuited and helicopter-equipped men, getting off of, or out of something that landed in a cloud of dust or smoke. The four men start their helicopters, take off and fly to some height. On returning to the ground they remove their flying gear and wait. They are met by a fifth man, riding on a flying platform. Such an event would cause some interest in any community today, but in those times it could only be interpreted as supernatural—a miracle. The miracle may well be that the story has been preserved for us, twenty-six centuries later.
A word for word interpretation is only part of the oddity of this chapter. Several other aspects are worth pondering. The whole chapter has a well-worn feeling, as though the author had told and re-told it many times. It reads like a deposition, taken down by a police officer, after the witness, who prides himself on truthfulness, has told the story over and over to his incredulous friends. It has a certain poetic beauty. It has the style of one who is telling you the truth, no matter whether you are going to believe it or not. It is the presentation of a tableau that makes no sense to the man who witnessed it, or to those to whom he is describing it.
The product of a man's imagination is tied to his own experience, his own time. A wonderful tale of the supernatural may sound very imaginative to the contemporary of the teller, but it will date itself to a later generation. The lives of the Greek gods are related to the lives of the early Greeks. An imaginative science-fiction writer such as Jules Verne is limited in the same way. As good as he was, experience has set an outer limit to his imagination. Ezekiel's tale is not in this class. To his contemporaries, it was out of step with reality. To us it is real enough, but out of step with time. The most credible explanation is that it really happened.